


Duel Beyond Fate

by The_Client



Series: Scenes from an Alternate Episode IX (writing order) [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Hopeful Ending, Kef Bir, Kyber Crystals, Lightsaber Battles, Nature of the Force, Rey is Not a Palpatine, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22395085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Client/pseuds/The_Client
Summary: The duel on the Death Star ruins and its aftermath, re-imagined with a radically different setup and motivations. All works in this series can be read independently, or in any order.Content warning: mild/brief suicidal thoughts***“Why did you let me do that?” she half-howls again through her tears. Tears of relief; of the remorse and horror and sheer unanticipated loss that she hadn’t had time to process before they were relieved. Somehow it all comes out sounding like anger.“You surprised me,” he says, very softly. “I couldn't defend myself without hurting you. I can't hurt you.” He lowers his eyes, letting his hair fall in his face. “Besides, if it was … what you needed. If it's still what you need. Then you should have it.”“You think I … 'needed' to impale you.”“On Starkiller. Solo … my father. I think he knew. I thought I needed to take his life. I know now I was wrong, but then … he knew, and yet he said, 'Yes. Anything.' And afterward, when he put his hand on my face … not forgiveness. For him there was nothing to forgive. He just wanted to comfort me, even a little, any way he could, for as long as he could.“Now … I just want you to have what you need. Anything.”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Scenes from an Alternate Episode IX (writing order) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600099
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	Duel Beyond Fate

The great durasteel hulk breaches the sea of Kef Bir like the remnants of a lost continent. The _Steadfast’s_ computerized archives had yielded recent topographical scans overlaid with Imperial blueprints, remnants of some proposal to salvage the ruins that had never quite received the necessary bureaucratic approvals. The turret he seeks is above water, and more intact than most.

He lands the Silencer as close to it as he can, then steps out onto the slick and tilted surface, marshaling the Force to keep his footing. When he scrambles into the throne room, the desolate beauty takes his breath away. White light streaming through the artistically broken frames of the great viewports, igniting the mist-laden air. Wreckage piled like fallen trees in some enchanted forest. Wind sighing through the irregular rifts in the structure, as through the openings of some vast and twisted flute.

_If you would find me, look in my last abode._

He draws his saber, intending to examine the room more closely by its light. (Echoes of Uncle Luke, back when his blade had been blue and mockingly serene: _Bleeding banthas, kid, can we_ not _use a deadly weapon as a handlight? Treat it so casually and you’ll forget how dangerous it is._ )

But as soon as he depresses the ignition, sparks seem to spread along the dark salt-crusted surface under his feet, as if he had somehow set the floor on fire. _Red kyber_ , he realizes, inlaid in the floor, black and near-invisible until it glowed crimson in response to his weapon. Forming a pattern. He gestures with his free hand, sweeping aside debris.

A star map. The representation scheme unfamiliar, but with enough clearly identifiable reference points that he can surely puzzle out the rest. A Sith rune at its center: _Exogol._

Even as he commits the map to memory, the whirring in his ears momentarily drowns out the wind – and she is _there,_ seated meditation-style at the foot of the half-wrecked throne. Her eyes linger on the map as she rises to her feet; only belatedly does he think to extinguish his weapon and plunge the floor back into darkness. In her hands is a fabulous object – the grip of a saber-staff, surely, but constructed unlike any illustration he’s ever studied.

Yet the specific, unsettling _presence_ of the kyber within is familiar.

“Is that--”

She ignites the blades. He feels more detached intrigue than fear. _Two_ blades: interesting that each half of the crystal they’d torn in twain could apparently function independently. And they’re _white,_ clear as starlight.

“ _Yes,_ it’s what’s left of your Maker-damned dead grandfather’s kriffing lightsaber.”

“No. It’s yours.” The words come simply, without jealousy, because they’re so _true_. The mismatched – _scavenged –_ but ingeniously functional conglomeration of parts; the blades untainted by the colors of the Jedi or the Sith. All _her._

She blinks at the comment, then shakes her head, seeming to re-focus. This is no chance, he realizes; she _brought_ herself here, with purpose.

“ _He_ sent you here,” she says. _The ancient evil._

If he lies she’ll feel it in the bond. And besides, he's so tired of hiding from her.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to go to him.”

“Maybe.” At the barely perceptible, aggressive shift of her posture, he hastens to add, “To … let him take me. If that will satisfy him. If it will keep you safe.”

“Keep _me_ safe? What about the rest of the galaxy?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything we can do about that. I’m afraid he’s more powerful than either of us.”

“So you’re not even going to try?”

He has no answer.

“I can’t let that happen.”

She sounds so sad. But she spins the white laser-staff in her hands and _strikes._

At first he only dodges and retreats, skipping and sliding backwards. But she is relentless. By the time they’ve dropped out of the throne room and scrambled back out to the sea-swept surface, he’s had to draw his weapon. Their blades moan in the waterlogged air, his overlaid as always with its agonized _crackling._ The crystals in hers seem alive with inscrutable disapproval, their vibrations oscillating from the durasteel under his feet to the roots of his teeth.

Time slows as they dance along the bent and tilted decks. For a while he just blocks her staff, but eventually he begins to press the offensive, hoping to tire her, to dissuade her of the wisdom of her course. Careful to pull his blows, to never actually touch her. He’s the formally trained lightsaber fighter, used to facing long weapons in the hands of the Knights, in control of his mind and body as he hadn't been on Starkiller. Surely he can keep them both safe.

(Uncle Luke: _There's no such thing as safe lightsaber combat, kid._ )

A vast wave crashes over them, and only the Force keeps him from being swept out to sea. When the water recedes he’s half-blind with stinging salt, his leather armor a stiff, sopping drag on his body. When he recovers enough to look for her she’s still there, still coming at him.

“If you surrender to him he’ll just use you. Turn your power against the galaxy.”

He knows. But if he can extract one promise – not to turn it against _her_ – he’ll pay that price.

The ground shifts beneath his feet, and he blinks in the green-gold light of the unknown jungle planet. _The Resistance base_. She’s drawn him into her milieu once again. He makes a carefully calibrated attack, forcing her to move in the opposite direction until the blue-gray desolation of Kef Bir reasserts itself.

Then, impossibly, the scene changes again. His feet tangle in the undergrowth of untended forest as snowflakes drift before his eyes, his wet garments freezing to his skin, the night sky lit by the distant glow of the failing superweapon.

Then the mirror-polished floor, the burning brands and tatters of crimson falling all around him.

For the first time, there’s uncertainty in her expression. _She's experiencing it too._ But she presses on.

They’re in a place he’s never known, a narrow space all lined in metal like the corridors of a Star Destroyer – but enameled in blinding white, unsettlingly sterile. A dark object stands before them; their weapons happen to fall upon it in tandem, as if acting together to destroy it. At first he thinks it's his grandfather’s half-melted mask, standing on its plinth from his old quarters on the _Finalizer._ Then it’s the sentinel droid, its robes a pillar of darkness, its holoscreen head bearing Sidious’ face.

“ _Stop!_ ” he almost screams, when the ruins of Kef Bir blessedly reform around them. “Something's happening that we don't understand. It's too dangerous.”

“Will you listen to me? Promise me you won't go to him?”

 _Yes,_ he wants to say, if only to momentarily stay her onslaught. But she must feel his ambivalence, for she takes the offensive again, spinning her staff in both hands.

Then, like a hallucination, her weapon seems to break in half. By the time he understands what’s happened – the oddly constructed staff actually a clever mechanism, made to separate into two swords – she’s already inside his guard, blades closing on him from left and right, high and low. Maybe it’s the Force, or just the instincts of long combat training, but he grasps the situation instantly: how any move he makes to save himself from her blades must send his own slicing through her arm, her leg, her torso.

There’s no ambivalence, no hesitation now. He releases the ignition, lets his weapon fall. As it drops between her closing hands, there’s an ear-splitting _crack_ and a burst of light, as if a firecracker had gone off in front of him.

It puzzles him so thoroughly that he almost doesn't notice the blade entering his chest.

_***_

The pain flares, recedes into numbness, then escalates exponentially, radiating outward from its point of origin. His limbs stop obeying him and he crashes to the deck. With great detachment, he notices the hunk of shrapnel lying not far from his face: his saber, its cylindrical shaft burst raggedly open along its length. A fine red powder glistens in the fissure.

His predominant emotion is relief, mixed with the familiar chagrin of realizing his mistake, _just_ too late. He should never have fought her, not even as an unwilling participant. Should have let her have this, on Starkiller and all the times afterward. Should have let her have anything, everything.

Yet when her face comes into view, it’s not triumphant, but horrified. Is there a reason he should care more that he’s dying? Oh yes. _The ancient evil returned._ It kills him, figuratively, that she’ll be left alone with it now. But it’s too late to do anything about it.

“ _Why did you let me do that?”_ Her own deactivated sabers clatter to the deck, the crystals buzzing with their otherworldly life, more real to him now than the signals of his senses. Her hands are on him, though he more sees than feels them, his skin numb even as his insides contract in agony. She’s pressing on the wound, frantically casting about in the Force for guidance, remembering the sight of another saber entering another man’s chest –

– which he knows because _it’s happening again,_ what happened when he stripped away the armor of his glove, accepting the terrifying vulnerability, and reached across the galaxy into her golden firelight. He _is_ her, yet still enough himself to observe, to see the totality of her as it’s not possible for her to see herself. The galaxy of her soul is too vast to fully analyze or contain, but certain constellations burn bright and unmistakable. The buried, bitter memories of her parents, that he’d so catastrophically tried to use against her. The sight of her first – and still only – true mentor, far below and out of her reach, pierced by anguish-made-visible, falling.

(He wonders if she’s experiencing the same scene through his memory, if she knows how the guilt and remorse cut into him still. If she senses the new, aching epiphany that dawns on him even now.)

Then the galaxy seems to atomize around him, and he thinks his eardrums will burst from the shrieking of the kyber.

***

When he finds himself again, she’s no longer touching him. The blazing agony is gone, leaving him to feel the rising bruises where he’d hit the deck; the panting exhaustion and incipient muscle soreness of combat; the ache of the cold damp weather settling into the scar tissue from Starkiller. He can feel his arms and legs again. He can sit up.

Her dilated eyes are focused on his torso. He looks down, sees still-bright blood soaking the leather and wool around the hole she’d made. But beneath the ragged garments, whole flesh.

The wound is gone.

***

The screaming in her ears stops and the galaxy reassembles itself, leaving her again able to hear; to see; to feel the decking beneath her knees.

“ _Why did you let me do that?”_ she half-howls again through her tears. Tears of relief; of the remorse and horror and sheer unanticipated _loss_ that she hadn’t had time to process before they were relieved. Somehow it all comes out sounding like anger.

His eyes are dilated huge and dark in his deathly-pale face.

“You surprised me,” he says, very softly. “I couldn't defend myself without hurting you. I can't hurt you.” He lowers his eyes, letting his hair fall in his face. “Besides, if it was … what you needed. If it's still what you need. Then you should have it.”

She struggles to process the disconnected phrases. “You think I … 'needed' to impale you.”

“On Starkiller. Solo … my father. I think he knew. I thought I _needed_ to take his life. I know now I was wrong, but then … he _knew_ , and yet he said, 'Yes. _Anything._ ' And afterward, when he put his hand on my face … not forgiveness. For him there was nothing to forgive. He just wanted to comfort me, even a little, any way he could, for as long as he could.

“Now … I just want you to have what you need. Anything.”

She rises to her feet, turns her back on him; walks away until she feels the bond stretch, sees the jungle of Ajan Kloss overlay her vision. Immediately she retreats a few steps, putting her feet firmly back on the metal deck. She fills her lungs deeply with the sea air, takes a moment to let the tears recede.

“I don’t want you dead,” she decides. “I want – ‘need’ – you alive. Until further notice. Alright?”

“Alright.” So resigned, as if he's dismayed by her choice.

She returns to him, stopping just out of arm’s reach, though he’s made no move toward her. She’s not ready to risk that overwhelming merging of identities again. She needs the clarity she came for, first. She sits down in meditation position, pulling her saber-hilts into her lap. The crystals shiver under her hands, reminding her of how they had seemed fit to tear existence itself asunder, just moments ago.

“Are they supposed to feel like that?”

As soon as the words are out, she cringes at her inanity: that this should be the first question she asks, after _what just happened._ But he lifts his head, and the spark of his personality seems to re-appear behind his eyes. It’s the sort of intellectual question that always engaged him, even during their early cross-galaxy spats.

“Like being watched by the weirdest alien you ever saw, only more so, because you can always look at an alien and think, _they have wants and needs and feelings too_?”

She'd forgotten again how good it could feel, simply to be _understood._

“No, they’re not supposed to feel like that,” he continues. Her surge of dismay must echo in the bond, for he hastens to add, “I mean, they feel like that _to me._ All kyber crystals, always, even when I was a kid _._ But when I tried to tell the other temple students about it, they looked at me like I had three heads. And Uncle Luke got uncomfortable and said it was disrespectful to speak of the kyber that way.”

She snorts. “I don't think they know, or care, whether they're being _disrespected._ ”

“No.”

“The Jedi texts say they’re alive. But … they’re kriffing _rocks._ ” Any stew-cook on Jakku would have died laughing, had she tried to contribute the carcass of such a “living thing” to the pot.

“Right. Some droids seem alive, once they’ve developed enough complexity in their programs. But we created them, so their intelligence is understandable to us. The kyber … there’s a … _presence_ there, but …”

She shudders. “It’s something else.”

“Right.”

Her eyes slide guiltily to the smoking ruin of his saber. “Did yours feel like that?”

“It did originally. Then I … altered it, after the manner of the Sith. And the mechanical ability to generate the blade was still there – though different, obviously. But that _presence_ was gone. Whatever life was left in the crystal became … just me. A mirror, or an extension.” A self-deprecating _huff_ that she supposes is laughter. “Yours didn’t seem to like that much.”

She remembers how breathtaking it had been, blazing against the forest night; the central blade just a touch too long, gorgeously disproportionate like its wielder. Remembers when she’d held it in the red room, feeling it tug at her hands like a vicious, faithful animal on a leash.

“I didn’t mean to destroy it,” she says.

He looks mystified, as if it never occurred to him to blame her. “It was the kyber in your weapons that shattered it, wasn’t it? When my crystal passed between yours. Did you know they were going to do that?”

“No. But I’m sorry. It was beautiful.”

Another rueful puff of laughter. “It was unstable. It would have blown my hand off sooner or later. Or my head.”

“Then why…?”

“It was what I needed. Or I thought so, at the time.”

They fall silent for long heartbeats.

“What just happened,” she finally says. “I read about it in the Jedi texts. They say it’s very rare.”

As she’d hoped, this approach engages his intellect again, brings his gaze back from the bleak distance. “Force healing,” he confirms. “A once in a generation event. If that.”

“The Force isn’t done with us.”

Barely audible: “No.”

“We have to face it.” _The ancient evil._ “Together.”

He stiffens, shoulders hunching and fingers clenching in that sadly familiar way. “To hell with that. It’s a suicide mission. You don’t deserve it.”

“It doesn’t care what we deserve. Only what we’re capable of.”

She rises to her feet, a saber in each hand. The heavier one is in her left. She extends it to him, as she once did another saber, to another man, in another place.

“You know where he is. Will you take me there?”

“To throw your life away? No.”

“ _Anything,_ you told me.”

He flinches, curling in on himself. The shame that floods the bond turns her stomach.

“Anything else. I won't surrender to him, if you don't want me to. I swear. But please don’t ask for _that._ It’s too much.”

Her heart twists more than she’d ever thought it could, after the _Supremacy_ when she’d learned – or so she’d told herself – to temper her expectations. But she knows what she has to do.

She turns, paints the jungle of Ajan Kloss in her mind’s eye, and steps forward and away.

***

“Chewie.”

He emerges unhurriedly from the bowels of the _Falcon_ , whining a gentle inquiry.

“I need to go somewhere. In a ship with room for two. The _Falcon_ is too … obvious, and I know the Resistance needs it.”

He looks at her appraisingly, wrinkling his muzzle around the terrifying canine teeth that will never mean anything but protection and safety to her. Then, he hauls a battered speeder from the cargo hold and motions her aboard.

They skim well beyond the borders of the base's informal shipyard, Chewie navigating easily without headlights. When they land, he passes her a handlight, then leads her through a curtain of vines into a surprisingly large, wide-mouthed cave.

She gasps at the sleek little ship, spare and graceful in design, jungle-grimed but very spaceworthy-looking.

 _It belonged to --._ He uses his signifier for General Organa, a Shyriiwook approximation of her given name: Leia. _[Lando] –_ General Calrissian, she understands, from the last war – _scrubbed its identity when she left the diplomatic life. Then we took turns keeping it for her: [Lando], my relatives on Kashyyyk, others she trusted. [Maz] had it at one of her vacation homes when Starkiller happened._

“I wondered how Maz got to Ajan Kloss. She just sort of showed up at the base one day.”

 _She landed here_ _and_ _commed me privately for a pickup._

Rey smiles. Of _course_ Maz and the Wookiee have a private comm frequency.

The ship is as lovely inside as out, pristine. Chewie shows her various compartments: rations, medkit, even weapons and money. Her fingers trace a silvery nameplate embedded in the white enamel control panel, left intact when the ship’s external signifiers were removed: _Mirrorbright._

“General Organa kept all this from the Resistance?”

A sonorous affirmative. _She never talked about it, but I think she kept it in reserve in case she ever needed to go to him. If he called for her, or an opportunity came for her to reach him._ Sad, depthlessly compassionate eyes pierce her. _That's what you're doing, right? Why you don't just take one of the single-seat fighters?_

She can't lie to those eyes, not even a half-truth. “I don't know,” she confesses. “I … have hope.”

***

He sprawls atop a promontory of the wreckage. He’s shed his outer layers, leaving only his soft wool tunic and trousers. The chill wind blows right through them, but it’s preferable to carrying what felt like kilos of soaking-wet, salt-stiffened leather. He’s tired of the weight, the constriction.

The Silencer awaits him faithfully, but returning to the _Steadfast_ seems impossible. He can’t imagine going through the motions of being Supreme Leader, tolerating the inanity of Hux and his ilk, pretending that he cared any more – that he had _ever_ cared – about their cause. He can no longer envision surrendering to _the ancient evil,_ either. He can see himself trying to destroy it – giving himself a good death – but he doesn’t even have a lightsaber with which to make the attempt.

He’s waiting for her to come back. He’s praying that she’ll never come back, that she’ll wash her hands of him and _the ancient evil_ both, and somehow be safe.

_There is no safety for her, while he lives._

The surprisingly boyish voice is unfamiliar, but the face of the translucent, blue-light-emanating figure is not. It’s a face he’s seen in a Clone War-era newsholo, a rare collector’s item obtained with great difficulty and expense, because Palpatine had worked so hard to destroy all evidence of Jedi heroism.

“You never answered me,” he says, childish disappointment somehow the first emotion to find expression, after all this time. “I _begged_ you for guidance.”

_You never really listened for me. That ruined mask, what it represents – it’s not me. You’ve known that for a while now._

_And your master conditioned you to hear only what he wished. He was very skilled at such things, and you were very vulnerable. For whatever role I played in the latter, however indirect, I am sorry._

Tears sting his eyes. _Weak, pathetic,_ he reflexively recites to himself, the habit ingrained over decades. But there’s no keen bite of shame in it any more, only dull despair.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

_She told you._

“‘Face it together?’ That’s not guidance. Don’t you have some grand vision for me? Some prophecy?”

His words are sarcastic, but the ghost’s response is not.

_Prophecy? Prophecy is misread by being read at all. Do you think the presence behind the kyber writes holodramas, linear stories of sentient beings acting on comprehensible sentient motivations? I think I experienced it trying, once, though the memory was taken from me until I died. The result was … macabre._

_No doubt Jedi scholars over the ages experienced some minuscule fraction of that, wrote it down and called it prophecy. Called the presence they experienced the gods. But they buried themselves so deep in their philosophical abstractions, their rules and taboos, that they_ _no longer even heard_ _the true voice of the kyber. Maybe there’s a grand design, but if so, it's unimaginable arrogance to think we're privy to it. And maybe there isn’t a grand design at all._

 _Maybe I’_ _m_ _the spawn of one of his little science experiments. Maybe she is too – Jakku has a special presence in the Force, after all; he had an observatory, a laboratory, there. Or maybe he's just a kriffing megalomaniac, deluding himself that he can create_ life. _Maybe correlation is not causation, and the anomaly of Jakku both drew his interest,_ _and_ _created her, each event bearing no relation to the other._

 _Or maybe it’s nothing to do with any of that. Maybe there have been thousands like me, like you, like her. Billions. Maybe the potential’s in every being_ _ever born_ _, but each one loses it_ _somewhere_ _in the branching of time. Maybe you retained it only through some astronomically improbable sequence of experiences and events._

_Maybe you each had to pass through your own personal hell, to reach this place. To match on some experience so foundational that it outweighs all your differences. The loneliness, perhaps. You've both always wanted so badly to be known, to be valued._

Tears are streaming down his face now, but the ghost is relentless.

 _To claim to know the will of the Force is folly. But I know_ him _. No matter how he explains it to himself intellectually, no matter if he reads your mind like a holobook, he cannot truly comprehend the valuation of another being’s happiness above one’s own. He is_ utterly _selfish. Incapable of perceiving the power that lets two beings sword-dance across time and space, that heals mortal wounds._

 _Maybe the bond between you is but one of a trillion experiments the Force launched into the_ _universe_ _, blind as evolution. But it’s the one that mates perfectly with his greatest weakness, like two halves of a broken crystal._

 _Let that be your_ guidance.

He struggles to speak through the tears. “I don’t know where she is, how to get to her.”

_She saw the same map you did. You know what she'll do._

He pulls on his wet boots and gets stiffly to his feet, feeling the residual soreness of combat, exacerbated by the cold. He thinks briefly of _preparations,_ of armor, weapons, knowledge; but he can see no purpose in seeking such things. It’s absurd to think that what they face can be defeated by force of arms, or by memorizing the abstract words of Jedi texts and Sith holocrons. Besides, every second he delays might make him too late.

 _It can’t be about hating him,_ says the ghost. _Or about deciding for her what she wants and needs. That was the most unforgivable of my mistakes._

No, he thinks, not bothering to speak aloud nor to project. He no longer needs the ghost to hear him.

She has decided, and he will follow. As he should have, all along.


End file.
